Changes:
- Feedback now syncs against the audio hardware instead of the CPUs timer.
- Query ID3/meta-info from audio streams to set defaults for the Track Name and Artist where available.
- Fixed a crash bug when more than one audio stream was set and they were both missing.
- Added song-specific fretboard customisation. (Fretboard should live in the song's folder with the .chart)

It seemed to me that the number of people reporting the drifting sync over time issue seemed to be increasing.
I could never reproduce this issue myself, so it was terribly difficult for me to isolate the problem, but after some extensive testing, I discovered some strange behaviour with various audio hardware.
It seems that different audio hardware/drivers may operate at slight different frequencies than one would expect. Some sound cards reportedly playing samples at 44100hz did not appear to be holding that exact samplerate when measured against the CPU's high resolution timer.
I've solved this problem by performing all sync relative to the audio hardware's playback cursor. I expect using this technique, nobody should experience any further sync problems over long playback intervals.
If anyone experiences any further issues, please let me know, as all I have is a 'good guess' that this is actually what is causing people problems.

In addition to that important fix, I made a couple of other tweaks.
I've added an option to set song-specific fret-boards. These override the theme fretboards when playing your song.
Also added code to read ID3/vorbis meta-tags to collect default song details, which seemed like a handy feature, and it was a bit of fun to write.
Lastly, I fixed another crash that one user was reporting.

Have fun!

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Old versions:

FeedBack v0.96b released.

Changes:
- Added bloody fretboard customisation!!
- Fired up some new frame skins, rather than just drawing coloured squares.
- Fixed rendering bug where StartOffset was set to something other than '0'.
- Fixed Shift Left/Right/Forward/Back selection range to be consistent with other selection related features (ie, final note is not included).
- Next Section (Alt+Up) no longer get's stuck if it encounters a section label on an odd step interval.
- Fixed the anchor logic so that it will not allow accidental placement of overlapping anchors, or placement at offset 0.
- Fixed the numpad keys which used to enter incorrect values.
- Holding 'Alt' while shifting notes forwards/back (Ctrl+Up/Down) will also shift sync and text events.

Theres nothing like a fresh new revision, with a fresh new version number to try and wash away the memories of a series of buggy 0.95x release.
After fielding bunches of bug reports and doing more extensive testing, it seems FeedBack is fairly stable again, if not more stable than ever.
But that's not why you really want this release...

So what's new, well, I began adding skinning code, and started adding the concept of Themes, but more importantly,
I ADDED BLOODY FRETBOARD SELECTION AND CUSTOMISATION!!!
Check 'Program Settings' in the Main Menu.

Now shut up and let me get back to work! ;)

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FeedBack v0.95e released.

Changes:
- Fixed save bug where some paths were getting messed up in some cases.
- Added support for streaming music from .wav files.
- Improved the file selector window a little more.
- Reverted the default chart resolution to 192. Less precise, but this gives me time to look into the problem some people have had.

If this one comes back to bite me in the arse, I WILL go fucking postal!

Fixed the save bugs.
Added support for wav files.
Reverted the resolution to 192 while i can look into the cause of some people having import problems into GHEx.

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FeedBack v0.95d released.

Changes:
- File selector window rewritten. Doesn't suck anymore!
- Fixed strange rendering bug where bar lines would disappear over time and other weird stuff could bugger up.
- Fixed midi loader. Some midi's with loads of junk (non-gh-related) data in them were failing to load.

This release fixes more bugs that were present in 0.95b/c.
Hopefully the last 0.95x release!!

Found and fixed a few more bugs that were reported by people recently.

Also of note, the file selector was rewritten to behave much more like you'd expect :P
Lots of people have complained about this.

I'm concerned about the GHEx chart importer, it doesn't seem to respect the chart's 'resolution' setting.. So new charts created at 960 resolution appear to have problems in GHEx.
Current work-around is to save your chart before you place any notes on it, edit it in notepad, and change the resolution to 192, then load and work with that..

I've spent a couple of days home from work sick this week, so I had a little time to work on some stuff that I've been wanting to do for ages!
The main change is a complete rewrite of the chart/notekeeping back end. It is now MUCH faster, and I finally cleaned up a lot of my old lazy code. Bear in mind, I haven't thoroughly tested all of FeedBack's features, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are loads of new bugs floating around in there.. Let me know if you find any!

Another major thing I got done, was tuning the Linux build's OpenGL renderer to run on Windows too. There is now a new exe, FeedBack_OpenGL.exe, and if you have trouble running the normal FeedBack exe, or if your video card is very old and slow, give the OpenGL version a go, and see if it works better for you...

In the future I'll be merging both renderers into the one exe and simply making the renderer an option in the config file.

Well I hope I haven't completely broken everything with this release! Have a go, see how it runs.. Let me know if it does run significantly faster for you. Especially on really long songs.

Well, I've been overseas most of this year so far, but I finally got around to punching out a release that everyone's been nagging for.
This one includes the endlessly requested custom quantisation setting!
Also, I have added a feature to copy track data between tracks (Tab Menu -> Copy Track Data).
Simply choose the target track (copy's from the active track), and you can choose to copy notes, specials, and events separately.

Well, here is NOT the release you've all been waiting for.
I still have a heap of stuff brewing, but I'm heading overseas for the next 10 weeks, so I wanted to do a bug fix release before I leave.
One thing of note in this release is the improved usefulness of the 'del' key.
You can remove events of any type by pressing the del key, this includes anchors, and BPM changes, which i know can be a pain in the arse to get rid of otherwise.
Give it a crack, improved stability is always nice..

That said, I really rushed this release.. Wanted to get it on here before bed tonight and hardly tested it at all.. Lets see how many things I managed to mess up in my haste ;)

I'll be in San Francisco for the week of GDC, so if anyone in that area wants to get in touch with me, maybe we can party! :D

Oh, and I have to thank FoG for taking the time to knock up a website template for me. I've been meaning to for ages, but I just haven't found the time.. Thanks mate!
I'll be adding a bunch of content to this website in the not-too-distant future.

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FeedBack v0.92c released.

Changes:
- When editing split screen, both tracks clap in their own speaker. So you can hear the claps for both at once.
- Fixed gameplay code, it actually works again now so you can play along as before. (I have not re-written the gameplay code, it still sucks, but its a good guide)
- PSP has made a re-appearance. Its working again.
- PSP audio streaming code all better now!
- Added support for mp3 playback on PSP.

Another small update.. Addresses some common requests.

Regarding the PSP build:
The audio stream code is finally working. It has support for both ogg and mp3 playback, where mp3 is recommended, due to ogg being way slower to decode (psp uses hardware assistance to decode the mp3's).
It runs perfectly usably at 60fps!
The key map is lame.. If anyone has a go at running the PSP version, you'll need to mess with the Config.ini file to find a key-map that works well.. If you do find a keymap that actually works, please send it to me so I can make it the default!
Also, choosing 'New Chart' or 'Load Chart' from the menu crashes the psp (bloody psp filesystem playing up)... you need to edit the config file to make it load the chart you want by default.

Note: The 'R' button is referred to in the config file as 'Shift' and mimic's the shift key's behaviour. The 'L' button is 'Pad_L2'.

Place it in your GAME150 folder. It does not run under the 3.0 kernel.

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FeedBack v0.91b released.

Changes:
- When a reference chart is enabled, Tilde '~' swaps between the 2 tracks so you can edit them both...
- F1 - F11 selects note track for the active track.
- Shift + F1-F4 selects difficulty for the active track.
- Point of view and hyperspeed are both supported on both tracks.
- Fixed the spelling of 'forward'... What can I say, I'm a coder...
- Added French translation (EDIT: I forgot to mention this when I first posted)

This is for all you whingey bastards that always find something to complain about! ;)
Note: I didn't test this at all... I hope it works..

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FeedBack v0.9b released.

Changes:
- Added .mid loading support. Supports GH1 and GH2 format .mid files.
- Added .mp3 support.
- Split screen editing. (you can only edit the left one.. the one on the right is for reference while editing)
- Added separate volume for each stream.
- Added a new translation system, with Spanish, Italian, and Swedish translations.
- Improved the UI a bit.
- .chart's can now be any resolution. The 'Resolution' field in the chart may not be fixed at 192. (Import midi's set to 480 for instance)
- Fixed bugs (crash entering events/etc)

Filled a couple of major requests with this one.. Getting sick of the PM's ;)

This is not the 'big release' I have been hinting at. That's gonna be a while off yet, so I just wanted to do a smaller release that adds lots of the frequently asked features.
Here it is.. Enjoy..

Note: F1-F12 no longer select difficulty/track, you need to change the chart in the pop-up menu (Tab key).

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FeedBack v0.7b released.

Changes:
- New 'Anchoring' system can now be used to sync songs faster, easier and more precisely. (Detailed below)
- Added 'Lefty Flip' for the southpaw's among you (this is for you Sottle)
- Added an icon (thx DOOManiac)
- Added X-Plorer support.
- 'Songs' folder is no longer cached, so you can add files to that folder without restarting the program.
- Fixed that annoying bug in the start offset. Start offset is safe (and recommended) to use again.
- You can now create sub-folders in your 'Songs' folder.
- In file selection menu's, you can begin typing the filename to skip to the first match (like in windows explorer)
- Added Hyperspeed (Apostrophe key)
- Fixed a silly bugs where the controls were being written to the config file in reverse order each time you quit.
- Fixed another bug where notes on the same tick were being written to the chart in reverse order each time (makes no difference, just kept making a mess of my .diff files)
- Updated the InputMapper.exe program to provide more useful information and fixed the POV control bug.
- No longer links to XInput, so no DLL woes. (sorry, not true.. I fucked up)

This release has been a long time in the making.
The major change is the new 'anchor' syncing system which I will briefly detail here.

Traditionally, when the songs BPM drifts, you would need to place many subtle BPM changes to compensate as the song go's, this is tedious and time consuming.. Also every time you tweak a BPM early in the song, it throws the entire rest of the song out of sync.

Using anchors, you can place anchor points throughout the song which act as BPM barriers, that is, any BPM change that occurs before an anchor will not affect any sync work after the anchor.

To place an anchor, press the 'A' key. Anchor's also always coincide with a BPM change event which affects all notes after the anchor as usual.

I propose a new way to sync up songs from now on:
Lets say for example, you have a song that drifts BPM. What you can do is find a single bpm at the start of the song that roughly matches the song from start to finish (or at least until major sync points). Don't worry about making it exact, it just needs to be close enough that the beat counts are roughly in time with the music.

Now, place anchor's at each major sync point, correcting the BPM to roughly match each new section as you go.

The beat you place the anchor on will likely not fall exactly on the beat in the music if you did it roughly, so what you do is, use the [ and ] keys to adjust the anchor's exact position (counted in microseconds (use Shift/Ctrl/Ctrl+Shift like with BPM changes)) until the anchor exactly matches the beat of the music. Previous BPM's will be re-calculated such that the beat will fall at the exact time specified by the anchor..
Sync all major sync points using this method.

Now for the minor drifting in between major sync points.
Play back the song and identify areas where it is farthest out of time. Place an anchor here on a major beat, ie, a measure line. Then again, use [ and ] to line it up with the music perfectly.. Place as many if these as you need wherever the metronome starts to go out of time with the music.

Provided you followed those directions correctly, you should have a perfectly synced song!! And painlessly!

Shifting an anchor will not affect any other anchors in the song..
The start offset should still be used for the start of the song and it can now only be changed by using [ and ] when you have selected beat 0.

Modifying the start offset WILL shift all anchors relative to the start offset, so make sure you have that spot on BEFORE placing any anchors in the song. If you download a chart, and your MP3 has a different amount of gap at the start of the music stream, you can easilly shift the start offset to compensate, which will line up all the anchors correctly with your MP3.

I'd appreciate feedback from people who use this system and let me know how it works out for them.

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FeedBack v0.6.1b released.

THIS UPDATE CONTAINS IMPORTANT SYNC FIXES, EVERYONE SHOULD UPDATE TO THIS VERSION!

Changes:
- Fixed the annoying sync loss problem when you leave it playing for a few minutes without stopping.
- Changed all internal sync code to more precise fixed point code (which I should have written from the start, call it laziness :/) .. This should be precise to around 1 microsecond.
- Tried to fix the outstanding CPU usage in various circumstances (if it still remains a problem, let me know.
- Improved the general performance a little. dB should now be more tolerant to random windows stuttering that you get on some systems.
- Supported subdirectories in the Songs folder.

- Added my other tracks as demo tracks.

I wanted to release this version before I leave for china on saturday. I'll be gone for 10 days, so I wont be working on it during that time.
I felt these sync issues were important to get to everyone as soon as possible.
Please everybody upgrade to this release.

- Changed the demo song to my first proper attempt at a custom, Sonata Arctica - My Land (from Ecliptica). Not finished, needs tweaking. Feedback welcome!

Small update, mainly bug fixes that were introduced into 0.5.9.
This is probably the last release before i add a front end maybe some gameplay code.
I'm adding realtime midi soon so i can read from midi drum kits and keyboards and try and incorperate that in gameplay.

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FeedBack v0.5.9b released.

Changes:
- Added custom key mapping (key map is defined in Config.ini).
- Added a popup quick-menu (Tab).
- Released a demo running on PSP (vorbis decoding is currently too slow for PSP).
- Track specific events ('W' key).
- Added feature to shift selected notes to the left or right, ie, up or down a fret (Ctrl-Left/Right).
- Added skip to next/prev section (Ctrl-Up/Down).
- Notes can no longer be placed over hold notes, the hold note is now truncated by the new note.
- Added a Stop-Return command (Shift+Space) which returns to where you started playing from when you stop.
- Added sound effects volume control.
- Sound now continues playing when the window loses focus.
- New (less helpful) help screen.
- New fretboards!
- Added a window title ;)
- Fixed bunches of bugs, including the missing ogg/chart file bug.

Fairly big update with a lot of things added and bugs fixed.
I released a little demo of the PSP build.. Its buggy and it crashes.. Ie, mostly unusable, but I thought people might be interested to give it a look...

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FeedBack v0.5.1b released.

Changes:
- Fixed some little bugs people were complaining about.
- Shifted the default location of the window (it overlapped some peoples taskbars).
- Added a volume control panel. (That beep can just be pretty overpowering! ;)

Just a few small changes while I'm at it..

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FeedBack v0.5b released.

Changes:
- Added Ctrl-G command to seek to section/beat/time.
- Added the main menu (finally!).
- Added New/Load/Chart Config/etc..
- Save settings on exit (Remembers the last chart you were working on).
- Added separate lead and bass streams.
- Added some more gamepad recognition.
- Fixed a bunch of annoying bugs.

I haven't done anywhere near all the stuff I wanted to get into this release, but I haven't had so much time recently, and there's a few good things that I know a lot of people would like in there, so I figure I'll release it now..
Lots more to come soon... Enjoy!

The Ctrl-G seek feature is fairly flexible, it can be used a few ways:
To seek to a specific beat, enter the beat as a number: 100.5
To seek to a specific time, enter the time in seconds followed by 's': 10.2s
In milliseconds, use 'ms': 10200ms
Or to seek to a named section, just enter the section name: my_section

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FeedBack v0.4.9b released.

Changes:
- Added event and song section placement ('E' and 'R' keys).
- Fixed a bug with multi processor and dual core timing.
- Added some more gamepad adapter recognitions.
- Massive source restructure and rewrite (cleaned out all the early debug code, and wrote proper extensible systems to build on).
- Updated the help ;)

This is a pre-release for my next major 0.5 release..
I've rewritten and restructured the vast majority of the code to tidy it up and make it more extensible. I want to catch any bugs I've introduced before i do a major release.

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FeedBack v0.4b released.

Changes:
- Hopefully fixed the black/garbage screen bugs (I cant believe these cards still exist!)
- Fixed the crash loading large .chart's.. If there are any further problems, let me know..
- Always displays the time alongside the offset.
- Changed the font... to Arial
- Added support for a few more gamepads and adapters people have submitted.

Note: If there are further gfx bugs no matter how minor they are, please let me know.. As far as I can tell, this should fix them all..

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FeedBack v0.31b BUGFIX release.

This release fixes 2 critical bugs!
Users should update immediately as one bug had the ability to corrupt .chart files..

Fixes:
- Fixed a bug where the end of the file wasn't being truncated, resulting in junk data at the end of the file when saving after removing notes.
- Made it impossible to place zero length special/player section ranges.

Note: If you have a broken .chart file from the previous version, load it into the new version and re-save it.. It will attempt to fix the file as it imports.. If it fails to fix it properly, send me a PM and I can probably fix it manually for you.

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FeedBack v0.3b released.

A lot of people have been asking for some of the new stuff I've added.. I didn't want to release until I was happy I had fixed the gfx bugs, but I figured I'd release a smaller feature update in the mean time..

New features:
- 75-50% playback speed
- Special Power
- Player sections
- Hopefully fixed some of the minor gfx bugs
- Fixed a precision issue in the time counter (should hold time for long periods of time properly now)
- Added support for a few more ps2 adapters I've discovered
- A few other things... Cant remember..

Placing special power and player sections is the same as placing hold notes, but you use the 6+7 keys for the player sections, and 8 for the special..
They will show up as coloured bands alongside the track..

Note, this release wasn't exactly how I planned to release it, but I figure basic access to these features is better than nothing.

Hey people.. I thought it was time I made the first public release of my editor tool..
I've called it FeedBack (i liked the logo opportunities with the 'dB' in the middle right next to eachother)..

It is not specifically designed as a guitar hero editor, and I dont interact with any of their file formats.. The editor saves out a .chart file which katamakel has kindly agreed to add native support in GHEx for.. So the next revision of GHEx should allow you to load in a .chart file directly.. Otherwise i imagine a tool to convert .chart to/from .mid directly would be very simple to write and I could supply source code for reading the format..

My goal for the editor is to expand it into a more diverse music game, with network multiplayer including drums (by attaching a midi drum synth, or maybe one of those japanese BeatMania controllers) .. This editor will feature drum tracks and possibly other instruments, which may then be used in a separate multiplayer music game..

I'm not specifically trying to clone/mimic guitar hero, I want to bring some gaming elements that I don't feel exist in any existing games.. But as it is, the editor makes an excellent editor for GH customs..

This should help people make customs quickly and easily, and perhaps put an end to these horribly synced and poor quality charts that are flooding the scene ;)

Try it out! I hope it becomes the standard for editing customs, and I'll do my best to respond to bugs/feedback and improve it where I can..

PS: I'm still looking for people to help me with art.. I want to give the editor/game a more unique look/feel since it is planned to become an independant game in its own right..

Last edited by TurkeyMan on Thu Jan 23, 2014 3:36 pm; edited 59 times in total

When you extract the archive, you'll see a Songs/ folder, and a Config.ini file.
You need to convert your mp3 to .ogg and put it in the Songs/ folder, then you need to edit the Config.ini and set Song = "your song" in the ini file.. where "your song" is the filename of the song WITHOUT the .ogg file extension...

Then you can run the editor ('FeedBack.exe') and it will load the song directed by the config file.. You can press 'H' to see the help window which will list most of the useful functions that currently exist in the editor..
After you've placed some notes, you can press 'S' to save the chart. It will save a 'your song.chart' file alongside the .ogg in the Songs/ folder, and next time you load the editor it will find the .chart file and pick up where you left off..

When the next GHEx is released, you will be able to load the .chart into GHEx and test it out

Note: This is a BETA release.. The code is fairly green and quite brittle.. If it crashes on you for whatever reason, please let me know about it and I can fix it up..
I'd appreciate a credit when you make a song using my editor, so that other people can become aware that it exists and possibly try it out for themselves

For anybody wondering if this editor is worth a shot, I can tell you that it most certainly is. I've tried almost every method of making custom songs, and have helped with the beta testing on FeedBack. It allows for awesome precision, and is very user friendly. If you are interested in seeing the results of a song designed in FeedBack, I have a preview of my custom chart for Concerto posted in my custom song thread.

Also, a couple of useful controls that I didn't see metioned on the help screen at this time, for anyone who gives FeedBack a shot.

S = Save
When changing tempo, you can adjust with greater precision by holdin control and then pressing + or -, this works when setting your offset as well.

Last edited by elx on Wed Feb 28, 2007 1:47 pm; edited 1 time in total

I have also beta tested this editor and it is really awesome and easy to use. So easy to change BPM on the fly, add notes, delete notes, editor moves fast, has a metronome, clap track that claps to every note. Everyone must check this out!

Also worth knowing is that while holding shift to select notes for copy/paste, you can use pageup/pagedown or home/end to select the entire chart which is useful for copying to other difficulties to start it off..

Wow, this looks a great project, it'll help a lot of beginners to make their own quality songs ;) Although I probably won't use that for making my songs, as I always base them in real tabs, it seems to be a great way to test songs before burning them... and with ghex integration, it makes life easier

A .mid/.chart converter would be necessary for me, as I always complete my midis with animation and section events. But I suppose that a standalone program for that won't be needed, because if ghex will support .chart files, the conversion to .mid must be there.

Thanks a lot for the awesome program! It looks like it will be an amazing help with editing. However, I seem to have a problem with the text- within FeedBack, the input setup, and the input test, all the characters appear as mangled fragmented blocks. The graphics and sound work fine. Is there anything that I need to do with my system setup (Windows XP) to get the fonts to work? Thanks a lot!

Ok, I was just testing FeedBack and it's great! This was the first time I've tried to create a custom song and in one hour I had almost finished. Yeah, it's not the hardest song, but this program is very straight-forward.

The quantisation change is really useful and simple, actually every feature on FeedBack is very user friendly. I loved it!

I'll try to create a few more customs while we wait for GHeX to support the chart files.

Instead of requiring songs be in .ogg format (which I am very fond of, by the way), why don't you allow the option of a .wav as well? It would save a step, and I can't imagine it would be too hard to implement. Converting to .ogg isn't that difficult for me right now, but I think it would add to the convenience for everyone.

But otherwise, the program looks excellent, and I'm going to be using it to make my first custom song very soon. Good job, man, keep up the hard work. _________________

I haven't done much yet, but so far this looks fantastic. Great job. :D

If you want some feedback though, I have a few suggestions:

- The font is pretty hard to read sometimes. I'd suggest a more normal, cleaner font. Verdana or something.

- It'd be nice to do things with the mouse instead of all keyboard. A toolbar is a must, as those are a lot of shortcut keys to remember, and functionality is only going to expand from here

- I know this is a personal preference thing, but I think the visual feel of it should look more like a tool and less like a game. I know you eventually want to have a full game out of this, but even then the editor interface should be different than the game interface.

- Maximized view doesn't play well with 1280x1024. In 3D view the time signatures and tempo changes to the side are cut off. In horizontal view the center bar thing is displayed offscreen to the left.

- Being able to print a chart would be spiffy

- Any reason why not to just GPL the thing? Then you can release your .chart format code and use a GPL MP3 decoder (along w/ other GPL code)

- Is a more editor-like file new/load/save system+ui coming? It only seems natural to have one.

- I noticed there are some input programs. I hope this means you plan on adding the ability to use a standard windows gamepad of our choosing (in my case, PS2->USB adapter + guitar controller) to "play" the song to record notes for a rough draft. That'd be awesome. :D

- This may be getting too Guitar Hero specific, but are there any plans for error checking type tools? Stuff like making sure you don't have another note in the middle of a sustain or other wacky stuff that can freak out GH.

- I feel strongly enough about the need for mouse support that I feel it merits another bullet point.

[edit]
I just tried playing around w/ it w/ my guitar controller plugged in. It does stuff. Awesome. The buttons are different though (orange goes to blue, etc). Probably because we're using different adapters. I'm using the RedOctane one. This is why user-defined button mapping is essential. :)
[/edit]

I can't wait for GHex support for this. I think I'll switch over completely to using this for my next project. :)

Last edited by DOOManiac on Thu Mar 01, 2007 1:47 am; edited 5 times in total